husk.org / blog. chaff. occasional witterings.

This is a post that I've found incredibly hard to bring myself to write, but a few events have combined to prompt me to finally get this entry out.

Firstly, Blue Coconut still doesn't work on Intel Macs, and I still don't have a machine to force me to make it work. That's going to happen next week though, all being well.

Secondly, there's the issue of iTunes Library Sharing encryption. iTunes 7 changed things. It introduced a scheme that broke Blue Coconut (annoyingly, in a manner that it doesn't report well), along with every other client and library that talks DAAP. Initially I hoped that, as with the 4.5 change back in 2004, a patch would emerge quickly, but it's now clear that that's not going to happen.

However, I recently came across the Save OurTunes site, which is aiming to get donations to revive the Java-based downloading tool. Since it's GPL, Blue Coconut will also benefit if the encryption is broken by this project. Therefore, the best thing you can do to help get my application to work with iTunes 7 is to support them.

Thirdly, I realised that I could cut through the issues with both encryption and the Intel build by removing authentication from Blue Coconut entirely, as an interim measure. This would mean that it wouldn't any longer work with any version of iTunes (except 4.0 and 4.1), but it would be able to use the open source reimplementations of DAAP, of which there are many. Not coincidentally, this is my use case, and as people have said recently, build something you need.

So, no promises, but with luck the next month or so should see at least a sprucing up of the app's site and also, maybe, a release. In the meantime, I can only apologise for the lack of support for what is still evidently a somewhat popular application.